Trees (long story)

[AustinBoston]

Trees

Background: I've written a few of these before, about basic aspects of U.S. National Parks and/or camping in general.

With just a few exceptions (I can only think of one), National Parks have, as one of their major defining factors, trees.  Even those like Death Valley that have very few trees, are noted for the absense of trees.  That one exception would be Key Biscayne, because it is nearly entirely under water.

Trees perform many functions in Nature.  Some we appreciate, some probably slip right past us without being noticed.

One aspect we take for granted is the roots.  Roots are nature's erosion control systems.  They hold soil in place.  Some trees' roots go deep, and act a little like rebar holding a hillside in place.  But some of the largest trees, the Giant Sequoias, have broad mats of roots that only go down a few feet at most, providing support for themselves by tangling their roots with their neighbors.

Trees provide shelter for animals.  I was once in a local park in Massachusetts, hinking with my son.  There, about eight feet up, was a hole in a tree.  Curious about what was in it, I knocked on the tree.  Out popped two flying squirrels.  They scrambled about for a moment, looking us over, then popped back into the hole.  I'd never seen a flying squerrel before, even though they are reputed to be more numerous than all other squirrels in North America.  I got another chance to see a flying squirrel in Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.  There was another hole, and I knocked on the tree.  Nothing happened.  I shook the tree, and out popped a flying squirrel.  Unfortunately, he was in such a panic that I was quite sorry for disturbing him.

Trees provide food.  We were in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, standing with a ranger and a number of other people, no more than 25 feet from a tree that had three black bears in it.  The bears were part of a work crew, harvesting cherries and carefully storing large numbers of them in their stomachs.  From bees to birds to bears, trees provide nuts, seeds, leaves, and fruit for food.

A few national parks are about the trees themselves.  Redwood National and State Parks in California are examples.  Sequoia is named for it's trees, but believe it or not, Joshua Tree National Park is not named for it's trees.  That's because Joshua Trees are not trees at all, but the tallest member of the yucca plant.  Joshua Trees grow in parts of southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and northern Mexico, and nowhere else in the world.

I am sorry that I have forgotten which national park we were in, but we once went on a nature walk with a park ranger that focused on small living things in the forest.  One we examined was a tree that looks like a cross between a spruce and a palm tree, but only grows a few inches high.  We have fossilized remains of the same trees up to 60 feet high, but today it seldom reaches six inches, and is usually less than three.  What a contrast - from the height and thickness of a giant sequia - perhaps the largest living thing on the planet - to these tiny things.

One national park that seems to cover a lot of ground when it comes to trees is Acadia National Park in Maine.  It has the scrub-like growth of oaks and pines generally less than ten feet tall right at the ocean's shore.  It has large stands of densely packed fir trees.  It has large areas of mixed hardwoods.  It has mountain scrub pines as you go higher in the hills. and it has a treeeline - an altitude above which there are no trees.  I'm not sure the treeline in Acadia is a climactic one; it seems more to me that it is caused by a complete lack of soil above a certain altitude.  

One of the things you can see from the top of Acadia's Cadillac Mountain is the aftermath of another tree-related feature.  The lower elevation of the eastern part of the park was once a vast, very dense fir forest.  but there was a huge fire (I think it was in the 1930's but I may have that date wrong).  Tens of thousands of acres were burned.  It burned an area that was once known as "millionare row," destroying mansion after mansion.  Most were never rebuilt.  Today, more than 75 years later, you can see a strong line between the mixed hardwoods of varying shades of green (or in the fall, mixed colors) that filled in the burned areas and the dark green of the fir trees of the peninsula to the south near Otter Cliffs that escaped the fire and still has the dense fir forest.  When driving across that line, you can see, feel, and even smell that you have moved to a very different habitat.

There are more trees in the U.S. today than there were in 1900.  That's because until about 1900, the biggest source of consumer fuel was wood.  As supplies of fuel wood became short, we gradually shifted our consumer fuels to things like oil and natural gas.  I think this is a good thing, because I believe if you must cut down a tree, it is better to turn it into something that lasts, rather than converting it into smoke.  Failure to last is the biggest problem with paper.  We use it for a day, and dump it.  Please, the biggest thing in landfills today is not plastic or metal, it's newspaper.  Even though the majority of newsprint today comes from tree farms, it still takes a generation to grow a tree.  Don't trash that newspaper, recycle it.

This, of course, is in direct contradiction to my next point, that trees provide campfires.  We generally only use fires for cooking most of the summer.  If we camp in the cooler parts of the spring or fall, then we might have a more lasting campfire.  But...isn't that just turning trees into smoke?  My answer is that campfires turn trees into memories, and those of us who camp know memories can last a lifetime.

We've camped in places that had no trees.  There simply were no trees.  I don't mean there were no trees in the campground, but there were no trees.  There were places you could find a bit of desert scrub, but otherwise, there were no trees.  Surprisingly, we were there to visit an area known for it's trees.  The park is even named for it's trees.  But those trees were long ago turned to stone.  Petrified Forest National Park includes the fossilized remains of thousands of trees covered by volcanic ash and water, ages and ages ago.  Today, the forces of erosion are revealing these gems in a new beauty that, while perhaps not matching the beauty they had in life, it is certanly a more lasting one.  The biggest problem there today is that small-minded people insist on stealing the trees turned to stone.

We camped in one place where there were so many trees, there was barely room for our camper.  We had fir boughs brushing the tenting on one side, more fir boughs forming a canopy over our door, fir boughs brushing the back bunk, and fir boughs touching the front bunk.  One could not see four feet for all the trees.  The aroma of all these fir trees filled our camper.  It was one of those campgrounds we will never forget.

Another remarkable campground was one where we camped next to a tree stump.  A tree stump?  Yes, a tree stump.  But this was no ordinary tree stump.  It was more then 8 feet high.  And it was bigger than our pop-up.  It was the stump of a giant redwood, cut generations earlier.  While I question the wisdom of cutting such a large, old tree, I don't know why it was cut.  It may have been damaged by lightening and risked falling down or even burned.  It may have been used to build something that needed to resist rotting.  It may have even been cut because it fell.  My kids, who climbed the stump, reported that it was hollow or had a hole in it.  But in any case, it is a testimony to how great the tree once was that even it's stump is still so dramatic, generations after it was cut.

I once read of a man who's teenage daughters were more than a bit synical about camping.  They referred to it as "sleeping with trees."  But having heard owls in the night, having seen startled coons scamper up the nearest tree, their eyes glowing in my flashlight, having heard breeses through aspen leaves, through pine needles, through oaks, and learned to tell the difference, I shure can't part with "sleeping with trees" any time soon.

Austin

[SpeakEasy]

You might enjoy this:

http://www.plt.org/

(As part of my "real life," I'm an instructor with Project Learning Tree.)

[sequoyausa]

Project Learning Tree was really big in California about 10 years ago. I am a primary teacher (K) in Sacramento and spent some great summers attending workshops, but PLT seems to have disappeared here. It's sad. Seems like all the focus anymore is reading and math. It's tragic for our children. Hope it revives here again!

[tlhdoc]

Another nice story Auston.